Tag Archives: Pandemic Shadows Project

Pandemic Shadows in Feminine Moments

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Laurie says:

Birthe Havemoeller has published the internet magazine Feminist Moments for about 20 years from Denmark. She just published “New Works by Laurie Toby Edison” featuring four photographs from Pandemic Shadows. I am still finding interesting shadows occasionally, for a project I thought was finished.

She is also a superb photographer and I wrote about her here.

Below are the photographs and the text I wrote for Birthe. I strongly recommend looking at the rest of the magazine as well – it’s remarkable.

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Autumn leaves and shadows (Pandemic Shadows 112)
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I walk & live in the shadow of the pandemic while photographing Pandemic Shadows everywhere. I make beauty in hard times. I started this in the lockdown and continued until very recently. It’s just about finished now. I’ve been a photographer since my late 40s. My latest project started in the lockdown looking for things to photograph. It’s my first project that didn’t involve model cooperation. It’s been very revelatory as a photographic experience.

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Leaves and branches (Pandemic Shadows 116)
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My books of photographs are “Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes” and “Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes” (all edited by Debbie Notkin). My photographs have been exhibited in many cities, including New York, Tokyo, Kyoto, Toronto, Boston, London, Shanghai, Seoul and San Francisco. My solo exhibition “Meditations on the Body” at the National Museum of Art in Osaka featured 100 photographs from all three of my photographic suites. My latest completed project is “Women of Japan“, clothed portraits of women from many cultures and backgrounds.

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Berkeley flowers and leaves (Pandemic Shadows 126)
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I most recently had Pandemic Shadows photos exhibited in ‘Light & Shadow,’ at the Valid World Hall Gallery in Barcelona. Photographs from other projects in their permanent collection were featured in “Crossing Borders,” the inaugural show of Gallery Terra-S at Kyoto Seika University.

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Sidewalk lines (Pandemic Shadows 115)
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I’m an activist on body image and other social justice issues. I blog with Debbie Notkin at Body Impolitic http://laurietobyedison.com/body-impolitic-blog/, talking about body image, photography, art and related issues.

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Debbie has deleted her Twitter account. Follow her on Mastodon.

Follow Laurie’s Pandemic Shadows photos on Instagram.

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Upside Down

Laurie says:

The Upside Down exhibition is in the PH21 Gallery in Budapest. It opens on March 7th and I’ll write about it then. But it was also a revelatory experience and I’m writing about that now.

One of the images that I submitted for this exhibition was from my Pandemic Shadows project and it was permanently changed because the reverse image was a better composition.

The two images are below. Please click on them for the best quality image.

This is the original Pandemic Shadows #36 – shadows on a mailbox

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And this is the “upside down” version, which is to me, more beautiful.

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I was amazed at how much I was even more delighted with the composition. In part because I was very satisfied with the original.

While photographs are valued for their depictive potential and representative content, the non-depictive, non-representational aspects of photographic works are also strongly related to their aesthetic significance. In this spirit, art photography has always aimed for the unity of form and content. Abstract photography has gone even further, celebrating abstract compositions for their own sake, without the need for appreciating or even recognising depictive content in the images. Turning a photograph upside down tends to strip it from its representative function, because the depicted scene and objects are difficult if not impossible to recognise when the image is turned to its side or upside down. However, the formal, compositional aspects of photographs become more pronounced that way, as our attention is steered away from scene and object recognition. In our Upside down exhibition, we would like to show photographs that are indeed turned upside down. Any photograph is eligible if the artist is willing to show it in this unusual way. Abstract photographs might be considered to be the most suitable candidates for this experimental exhibiting method, but there are many depictive works as well whose compositional qualities might also be appreciated in novel ways when turning them upside down, thus liberating us from studying and concentrating on their representational content. Landscapes, bodyscapes, symmetrical compositions, or even architectural and street photography may be good candidates for turning images upside down, but images in other photographic genres may also be considered for this exhibition.

PH21 Zsolt Bátori

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Debbie is no longer active on Twitter. Watch this space to follow her on Mastodon.

Follow Laurie’s Pandemic Shadows photos on Instagram.

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